I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (6 page)

W
hen I entered the Neighborhood Playhouse, I knew I’d come home.

In my half year at Juilliard I discovered the limits of what talent I had as a lyric soprano. If it were Jane Austen’s time I might have shone as light after-dinner entertainment for guests. Facing reality, my undefeatable mother turned to the last art, acting. A lucky star led her to the Neighborhood Playhouse, then in the East Fifties off Fifth Avenue.

The atmosphere at the Playhouse was rigorous and strict. There were two extraordinary talents there: Sanford Meisner, a charter member and actor in the Group Theatre, which had revolutionized acting in America, and Martha Graham, the flaming talent who revolutionized modern dance. Both were cutting-edge artists with attitude.

Sandy was elegant and a snob. He looked down his nose at you from behind his square rimless glasses, hidden behind a cloud of smoke from his Pall Malls. I remember the brand because, as I became a favorite of his, he would send me to the corner drugstore on Fifth Avenue to buy him a pack. And of course Pall Malls were what I
forced myself to try smoking on top of the double-decker bus on the long ride home at night. I hated the taste and it made me dizzy, but I was determined to copy Sandy in everything. Years later, Sandy would have his voice box removed because of those cigarettes. He would make weird, robot-like sounds holding a microphone to his throat, but his own need to teach, to communicate, was indomitable.

“You are spoiled!” Sandy said to me.

Our very first assignment was to look for an object. For a certain handkerchief, or book, or necklace, hidden in the furniture onstage. An upright piano, a chest of drawers, a bookcase, a bed, a wastebasket, and so on. I searched the chest of drawers. Desultorily, then the bookcase.

“I can’t find it.”

“You are spoiled,” he said.

I understood. My first real education began.

I was my mother’s and Fremo’s beloved dolly. Marveled at within the confines of the brownstone and our apartment in 706 Riverside Drive.

When I sang “Embraceable You” to them on the couch, I dismantled them, trapped them with “You and you alone bring out the gypsy in me.” Both of them gasping, overcome by my power, unable to escape my pointed finger, first at my mother—“No, no,” she’d scream, hands up—then Fremo—“Lovey, stop, stop,” overcome. Breathless. Leaning against each other for protection against my gifts.

Yet at fifteen, when my Aunt Anne set up an audition for an agent at the William Morris Agency, the magic didn’t seem to work.

He, the agent, sat on a stool in this small audition room. I attacked him with “Embraceable You.” Trying to engage his eyes. With each “you” and “you alone,” his eyes averted, his stool turned. I couldn’t understand why the power didn’t work.

It confused me.

Outside my own living room, outside my own mother and aunt, I had no power, no impact.

In school I was a mediocre student. I had my friends on 148th Street, but was never the popular girl in school or in camp.

The dichotomy of my genius status at home and my slightly below par status in the outside world gave me a sense of instability and unreality throughout all of my life about exactly who I was and what I was capable of.

Could that be why I grabbed so ferociously at acting? Grounding myself in a structure that worked for me, the observant child?

To look for an object is the first exercise in the actor’s bible,
An Actor Prepares
, by Constantin Stanislavski, the Russian director of the Moscow Art Theatre who brought reality into acting at a time when declaring and performing to the audience was in vogue. Stanislavski designed exercises that forced your concentration within the situation, within the character, that took your focus off the audience, off pleasing anyone. It gave me what I thought of as round white life preservers held together by a rope, which was the play, allowing me to navigate from one life preserver to the next and to keep my head above water.

When Sandy spoke about objectives and actions, my senses clicked into place. I saw a road to security as an actor. I understood that we all have an objective in life. We have an objective every day. Today I need to make dinner. My actions are to walk up the hill to Broadway. Go to Barzini’s. Shop. Come home. Go to the kitchen. Cook. My objective is carried out. Dinner is on the table.

Transfer to working on a play: Find objectives within each scene for my character and the actions I need to take to carry it out. Objective: To borrow money from you. Why do I need it? How badly? When? Summer, winter, what time of day? What hour? Who are we to each other? Brother? Mother? Stranger? How much money are we talking
about? What actions do I take to convince you to give it to me? Lie? Or tell the truth? Charm, threaten, seduce, make you an offer you can’t refuse?

You get the idea. The essence of drama is conflict. What you choose to do with the conflict is unique to you as a talent, as an actor. And occasionally, particularly in the theater, your director’s vision of what he wants from you. It’s exciting and mysterious, talent is; that’s why we keep going.

In speech class we had Mary Van Dyke, a talented and focused teacher whom I have to thank for my speaking voice. When we first arrived she taped us talking and played it back. I played my recording back to myself many times. Was that really me with that tiny, high bird voice? Like my mother’s? Like Fremo’s? No wonder they gave me those dumb songs at Juilliard. Mary gave us exercises that forced us to use the chest voice, every day, at home, at school, until the new placement became habit.

In second-year speech, the assignment was to listen to other people’s conversations—strangers on the street, in stores, to capture the oddities in their voices, speech, or accents, and bring them to class, to train our ears. I listened to two girls behind me on the bus; I was so fascinated, I missed my stop. I brought one of the characters into class, and three years later I used her when I read for my first professional play,
Detective Story
. A fresh voice chattering away on the seat behind me blew open a fresh character who gave me an immense career.

•   •   •

I
n my second year at the Playhouse we put on a period, antebellum play of some kind, and I was assigned a dull brown dress. I hated its plainness. The other girls looked as if they’d stepped out of the Old South. Soft greens, pale lavenders, net and lace. I yearned to wear them. I approached Martha Graham.

“I don’t like this dress; it’s so plain. Can’t I have one like theirs?”

“Why?”

“Because they’re pretty.”

She turned a terrifying face toward me. “Pretty? Pretty? That’s what you want?”

Her face was mask-white, her hair black, her black brows frowned in a V, her mouth red.

“Ugly,” she emphasized, “is better than pretty!”

I stepped back. She held my look. I ran to the stairs and burst into tears. Why was she so angry? What line had I crossed? What did she mean?

Pretty
was one of my mother’s favorite words.

I was not pretty in my Salem-witch-trials-brown jersey dress. Is angry better than nice? How could ugly be better than pretty?

Sandy gave me an improvisation. He paired me with a boy in class.

“You two have been going together,” he said. “You, Lee, want to break up with him. You want him to leave. You”—he pointed to the boy—“want to stay!”

Conflict. I tried to get him to go. He wouldn’t. The more he wouldn’t, the more a storm built up inside of me, in places within myself that were new to me, foreign to me. Uncontrollable rage erupted from somewhere deep inside me and swept me away, until I pushed that boy, beat that boy out of my room. Ugly. I had a really interesting ugly side. Sandy’s eyebrows were raised slightly.

“Well,” he said. “Well, well, well. What have we here?”

Was that ugly better than pretty?

An actress I met much later in the Actors Studio, Vivian Nathan, was famous in our small circle for being able to cry on cue. If the script said,
She cries
, Vivian had tears falling down her face.

The rest of us have to work for the real pain that comes, the real grief that suddenly makes available our emotions, unlike the tears of
Merle Oberon and Norma Shearer, which rolled down the perfect faces on the black-and-white screens of my childhood.

All the restlessness, the intensity, the unnameable swirling storms, now had a place to go. And it was not only safe; it was worthy. There was a name for it. I would act. In a theater. From the time I was in the children’s ballet troupe at the Metropolitan at the age of four through the Art Students League, Music & Art high school, and voice at Juilliard, my poor mother had doused me in every art form she could. She had finally hit on the right one, and this one was mine, mine alone.

When I played Electra almost two decades later, there was a place in me I knew I could go to as an actress. And a way to pour all my life experience into her.

Acting was to become my religion. A holy, safe place, a process that took place inside of me and that was to be protected at all costs. Nothing ever was allowed to get between me and the process I had given myself, to create in my own way, with the tools Sandy Meisner had given me. My truth. I had at last found my holy grail.

•   •   •

T
here is a time in a young girl’s life, and a young boy’s, too, when you are a perfect pervert magnet. Dreamily sitting in the front seat of a double-decker bus, I became aware that across the aisle a thirtyish man seemed to be stabbing himself between the legs. I looked. He smiled. His stabbing was fierce. I suddenly screamed and ran, calling for the driver. The man ran past me down the stairs and out the bus.

I stopped taking the bus home from the Playhouse. On the subway was a facsimile of the same man, big, angry, smiling, whacking off between cars.

In my second year at the Playhouse, sitting in my crowded seat on the subway, I became aware of a man standing over me. His newspaper was open. He seemed to read it. He concentrated on one spot. I
realized this man had been this near me before. The next day I found a seat in a car in the front of the train. The following day, he was standing over me. I ran out at the next stop and took a local.

I was late to Sandy’s class. It was past nine a.m. No one was allowed in after nine a.m. I sat outside by myself. I needed to catch my breath. I went up to the closed door, turned the brass knob, and looked inside. Sandy looked up, annoyed.

“I want to tell you why I’m late.”

“It better be an interesting story,” Sandy said.

“I think it is.”

And so began an Arabian Nights saga. I was learning to use my fears and real experiences to entertain. At least once or twice a week, the well-dressed man with the newspaper loomed over me. He found me in whatever car I was in, on whatever train. I tried to elude him. Heart pounding, I thought,
I’m using you, scary man. And you’re almost as afraid of me as I am of you.

I could see that he couldn’t confront me, any more than I, at seventeen, could confront him. But knowing I could use my fear as an actor, to basically entertain Sandy and the class, was a great outlet. My stalker abruptly disappeared for one week, two weeks. And then he was gone, and I was free. I had a mini nervous breakdown in the girls’ bathroom.

•   •   •

T
he summer after my first year at the Playhouse, I got a job at Tamiment, a famous summer resort in the Poconos with a huge and famous summer theater and a great history of talented performers. Mervyn Nelson was the director, my first gay friend. At Tamiment, at seventeen, I played the mother in
Ghosts
to Mervyn Nelson playing my son, at thirty-seven; then played a thirteen-year-old in a Tennessee Williams one-act; then singing, dancing, and musical comedy on the
weekends. Singing alone for a huge audience gave me my first stage fright. I started drinking martinis before I sang and ended up a very scared kid sobbing in Mervyn’s lap at the end of the season.

Also hired that year was a cute Irish hoofer, Buster Burnell. Buster and I fell in summer love immediately. This is where my Uncle Raymond’s joke comes in, about the midget lady and the giant in the circus.

I shared my two-cot bungalow with Mildred from the Tamiment office. She was a large young woman, with one wiry dark hair growing from her breast near the nipple. I always wanted to pluck it out.

The fact that Buster entered the tiny bungalow every night to share my cot didn’t seem to bother her. She snored softly through our lovemaking. In my mind I was still a virgin. I knew there was a hymen, and I looked anxiously for bleeding many mornings-after. It never occurred to me that a childhood of ballet and the hard handlebars of my boy’s bike might have deflowered me. Buster strenuously and rhythmically hit my insides while I lay there, kind of liking it but pitying him for not having a large enough, long enough member to devirginize me, to draw blood and reach my throat, like the lucky midget lady. I was seventeen and biologically really stupid. Unfortunately, the little bungalows were very close to one another. Next to mine was a bungalow with four mariachi players. The raw squeaking of the cot disturbed their sleep; they banged on the walls and cursed me in Spanish.

As July slid into August, Buster said, “I thought you said you were a virgin.”

“I am.”

“You’re not.”

“Oh yes I am.”

I began telling him, with as much sensitivity as I could manage, how and in what way he was falling short. He regarded me in stunned
silence, uncertain if I was sane or putting him on. And then he kindly put my mind to rest about the biology and the mythology with which I had deluded myself.

•   •   •

A
ll the girls in the second year at the Playhouse were hot for Herbert Berghof, a Viennese actor then learning the Method from Sandy Meisner. Despite the fact that he was bald, Herbert was a fascinating, sexy man. All of us in Martha Graham’s class fell like flies, writhing in our jersey uniforms under his tolerant and, yes, interested gaze. Somehow he promised each of us a great romance, without a touch or a word. He was an accomplished tease.